Kanye West speaks on Cruel Summer ideologies

“I like when i get mad at music cause its so good like I’m like ‘oh shit why didn’t we think of that, why didn’t we do that’. I’m not interested in things unless they hit me in a certain place in my heart & in my gut–uhh–I get bored really easily. I’m like, majorly underwhelmed in general. I’m looking, for like, some form of excitement for this music to be our outlet” West explains.

“We started off by getting everyone in the lab together. We reached out to other camps to, you know, just do something new and exciting in hip hop, like something minus all the politics”

“One track might have 30 peoples’ opinions on it. Its not just about a tracklist and a name, its about a communal style of work. We spend just as much time working on the actual album packaging as like the video concept as the song; everything is equally as important. It got to a point where I had to have the album artwork in front of me while I was working on the songs, and I would listen and say ‘does this song sound like this packaging looks?’

Yeezy goes on to end the video by saying “This sin’t the begining of the conversation, this isn’t the end of the conversation, its our offering as a collective as a sonic snapshot of what’s happening right now, 2012; this Cruel Summer.”